Title page for ETD etd-05252005-140924

An Intrusion Detection System for Battery Exhaustion Attacks on Mobile Computers

Degree

Master of Science

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Advisory Committee

Advisor Name

Title

Martin, Thomas L.

Committee Chair

Ha, Dong Sam

Committee Member

Hsiao, Michael S.

Committee Member

Keywords

intrusion detection

IDS

battery exhaustion

power attacks

linear regression model

Date of Defense

2005-05-18

Availability

unrestricted

Abstract

Mobile personal computing devices continue to proliferate and individuals’ reliance on them for day-to-day needs necessitate that these platforms be secure. Mobile computers are subject to a unique form of denial of service attack known as a battery exhaustion attack, in which an attacker attempts to rapidly drain the battery of the device. Battery exhaustion attacks greatly reduce the utility of the mobile devices by decreasing battery life. If steps are not taken to thwart these attacks, they have the potential to become as widespread as the attacks that are currently mounted against desktop systems.

This thesis presents steps in the design of an intrusion detection system for detecting these attacks, a system that takes into account the performance, energy, and memory constraints of mobile computing devices. This intrusion detection system uses several parameters, such as CPU load and disk accesses, to estimate the power consumption of two test systems using multiple linear regression models, allowing us to find the energy used on a per process basis, and thus identifying processes that are potentially battery exhaustion attacks.